Overlord - Reviews & Interview

June 29th, 2007, 17:23

GameSpot appears to have their Overlordreview ready because they have a banner on the front page but it won't come up for me. So, moving on, CVG has kicked up their critique with the modest score of 7.5/10:

Instead, the fires of evil burn lukewarm. In your mission to turn the world towards darkness you'll travel through a Tolkienesque fantasy world filled with halfling encampments, human cities and elven forests. The remit is destruction and parody: turning the fantasy tropes on their head by making you a villain rather than a hero. But there's no wit here that reaches beyond farts and vomit. The setting is never anything but convenient imitation, and you'll commit more heinous acts letting the trucks crush your amphibian friend in Frogger than you'll manage here.

In related news, Ars Technica has interviewed Rhianna Pratchett, who wrote and co-designed the story. Many will know Rhianna wrote for Beyond Divinity an even did an E3 piece or two for us back at RPGDot. Here's a snip:

You're writing for evil characters, but the game has a strong comedic streak through it. How did you balance making the character a "bad guy" while still making people want to play as him? Was there ever a moment where you had an idea and worried that the player would recoil from their own actions?
Let's face it, everyone loves the bad guy. So I'd say that's a pretty easy sell! We've deliberately made it humorous, almost Peter Pan-evil, in nature partly to keep our ratings reasonable (we're not trying to be Manhunt with goblins) and because it was actually a lot more fun to design and write for that kind of story. You're "evil" in an amusing, rub-your-hands-together-and-go "Mwah-ha-ha" kind of way, rather than a pickling-babies-and-eating-human-livers way.
We didn't want to force players into doing really evil acts (ratings alert again!) but we wanted to give them the choice. So you start off as being default evil&mdash;you've got the dark tower, the spiky armor, the army of loyal minions at your command&mdash;and where you take your innate evilness from thereon in is totally up to you.

Gamespot has corrected its score from 6.5 to 7.5. The version they originally tested was not final.

Editor's note 06/28/07: GameSpot learned after this review was originally posted that the version of Overlord for the PC sent to us by Codemasters for review purposes was not actually the final version of the game. After testing the retail version of the game, we found that certain statements in the original review regarding the camera control were not accurate. The review was then updated and the score adjusted accordingly. GameSpot regrets the error.